As I’ve said before, I always enjoyed reading her writing, particularly about dance (although I have no real interest in dance).

And now, on to the regularly scheduled blog post.

 
I am not, so far, excited by, or even interested in, artificial intelligence (except in a very general way). By the way, I do not think that artificial intelligence will end the human race. If that happens, at least in my lifetime, it will be accomplished by human beings.

Would I use artificial intelligence to help me write my stories? To paraphrase Orson Welles, the stories might end up being better, but they wouldn’t be mine.

Also, even if my writing could be improved by artificial intelligence, where would be the fun in that?

If writing was my business, of course, that might make a difference, but obviously it isn’t. I do want my writing to be read by an audience of more than one — that’s why I make it publicly available for free — but I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.

But there is another, and more decisive, reason I won’t use artificial intelligence to write stories. The question that really hangs me up is not the question of fun — important as that is — it’s the question of ownership.

If I went to ChatGPT, or whatever, and developed a prompt to get it to write a story in my style and with my characters, who would own that story? Maybe there’s some fine print somewhere which says that I would own it, but what if tomorrow that fine print was changed to say the opposite?

Not worth the risk.

[Later: For an interesting article on the current legal situation with ownership, go here: “Is A.I. the Death of I.P.?“]

Now, it has been a while since I’ve started a new story, but that’s up to me to do. I’ve written some scenes, but until now they haven’t started to fit together.

But now, I think something is starting to come together. The turning point for me is usually a title. As I’ve talked about before, if you write a story in the conventional way, you can write it first and then title it later. When you write and publish serially, you need the title before you start posting, and now I think I may have a title…